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Phillip Jones
Shooting in the Dark

Phillip Jones, Flushing Meadow, Gelatin Silver Print, 1999/2012, Edition 18/45,
Signed Verso.

Artist Statement
Why night photography? Aside from the formal advantages of dramatic artificial light with tones that particularly suit black and white images, night photography is, at least partially, about nighttime itself and the questions of what we do and don’t see.

The night is when most of the world sleeps, but I’m most alert and looking for subjects and situations that throw me off guard. I like finding shots of a busy world at rest and apprehending that stillness, pregnant with tomorrow’s activity.

Shooting in the Dark alludes to the long nocturnal exposures used to capture these images and the mysterious and unpredictable information the film records. The prints reveal much more than the human eye can see at night. And, the passage of time in these images—whether the softened reflections off rippled water, extended headlights, or ghosted people—add a temporal and sometimes theatrical dimension.

Although I didn’t set out to photograph urban or industrial landscapes, I was attracted to their elegance and monumentality. Here, often ignored as background, was the heroic infrastructure of our civilization.

Like poetry, photography has multiple meanings that resist prosaic reduction. I like to think that’s especially true in the suspended dream world of night photography.

Artist Bio
Phillip Jones was born in 1951 in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area. His father was an Academy award-winning filmmaker and his mother operated an art gallery in Dupont Circle. In high school he received a Sears Foundation scholarship and studied with Gene Davis, the Washington Color School artist, each Saturday for a year. After high school, he studied at the Corcoran School of Art, Antioch College, and Cooper Union. He also began to exhibit his paintings.

In 1973 he moved to New York and worked in the television industry. His short film “Secrets” won numerous awards and was exhibited at the Whitney and Hirschhorn Museums. In 1979 he became a free-lance artist working both in set design for opera and medical illustration. He also continued to exhibit paintings. In 1986 he married Ellen Dunham-Jones and they moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he split his time between painting, illustration, and photography.

In 1990 they moved to Boston, and Phillip began exhibiting his photographic work. He’s exhibited at the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, the Fuller Museum, the Lafayette Museum, the Hunter Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Boston Center for the Arts, the Federal Reserve Gallery, the Cesium Gallery, and Chatham Gallery, with fourteen solo exhibits at his primary venue, the Mercury Gallery.

His work is in numerous collections including the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, Pfizer, Fidelity Investments, Putnam Investments, Accenture, Banana Republic, Levi Strauss, Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, and The Four Seasons.

He currently splits his time between Boston and Atlanta.